The Equitable Development Leadership Academy has danced across several iterations seeking to encourage youth leadership, community capacity building, and the well-being of all life. With the boundless support and ingenuity of Solvable, this work has come to life for me, and I am truly thrilled about the unique resources and experiences we are creating.
To inspire our work, we drew upon the wisdom of equity leaders hailing from all corners of the United States. We embarked on a spellbinding 5-part dialogue series, where we explored the threads needed to weave individual growth, organizational change, communal harmony, and systemic evolution. Through this exploration, we asked these multisector leaders to share their experiences and growth edges within four themes: anti-racist and decolonial development, inner work for societal transformation, ecological thriving, and community stewardship.
The depth of our conversations still reverberates within me, leaving me energized with inspiration. Here, I offer you a taste of the wisdom we uncovered together.
Dialogue 1: Anti-Racist and Decolonial Development
In the captivating dialogue on decolonial and antiracist development, the field leaders illuminated their utmost aspirations for communities and painted a vision of reindigenized societies where all members, including youth, families, and the nonhuman, can support each other. They passionately advocated for decolonizing education, creating a level playing field for all, healing generational trauma, and reestablishing reciprocal relationships with the Earth. Central goals included dismantling death-dealing policies and redefining communal well-being, envisioning poverty-free communities.
Amidst the pervasive impact of racism and colonization, they stressed self-love, autonomy from capitalism, and revitalizing relationships with people, places, and nature as paramount. In this decolonial journey, honoring traditional knowledge and fostering interconnectedness were emphasized, alongside embodying curiosity, humility, courage, and intentional collaboration. The path they illuminated was adorned with inclusivity, grace, joy, and storytelling, acknowledging the urgency and significance of embracing diverse perspectives, even if collective healing unfolds at a measured pace.
Dialogue 2: Inner Work for Societal Transformation
The field leaders then turned their gaze inward to reflect on the inner work needed for societal transformation. In this compelling session, they revealed personal development as a universal and lifelong journey. Unveiling the facade of American meritocracy, they stressed the need for others to ask hard questions and engage in meaning making for themselves,
Our dialogue surfaced a mosaic of inner work practices - from self-care and mindfulness to connecting with ancestors and nature. To connect within, some field leaders journal and others create art, and despite the differences in modalities, all aspire to face the discomfort of self-love, seek the balance between reactive impulses and soulful connections, and be rooted in compassion for oneself and others.
They described personal accountability as a catalyst for positive change, and for equity stewards to engage in inner work, they named the significance of leaning on support systems, making time to be creative, collaborating with diverse rightsholders, and acknowledging diversity of emotions. Their encouragement for young equity leaders was to cultivate vulnerability, compassion, and self-reflection, and they beckoned all to prioritize values-driven work, maintain curiosity, and intentionally slow down to be present. They offered that doing this work is hard, but the beauty that comes from showing up for oneself, learning from diverse perspectives, and being able to listen to the world around them is worth the struggle.
Dialogue 3: Ecological Thriving
The third dialogue called participants to resurface into the ecologies they call home and explore how community development can feed ecological thriving. The field leaders called us to imagine a world built on a life-centric paradigm that recognizes humans as part of a living ecosystem; where people know and experience the transformative power of nature every day; where equity and social justice are integral to environmental efforts, and where the perspectives of all beings, human and nonhuman, are included in environmental policy.
This dialogue highlighted the need to actively address more than human equity and systemic issues, while also emphasizing the restoration of damaged ecological systems through reciprocal relationships. The field leaders expressed how these aspirations are challenged by slow trust-building, tribalism, and greed in communities, but community-wide rituals, ceremonies, and generative habits could help surmount these obstacles. Nurturing the sacred bond with our nonhuman kin and encouraging a deep sense of belonging, they called for humans to rediscover our place within the interconnected web of life, leaving behind disembedded and extractive relationships with ecologies.
Dialogue 4: Community Stewardship
“How do you build trust in communities that resist change?” is a question we wrestled with in a rich conversation on community stewardship. Fostering equity, they shared, starts by building relationships and acknowledging shared struggles. The conversation didn't shy away from acknowledging the lack of diversity in decision-making bodies and the subsequent challenges of gaining buy-in for DEI initiatives.
Unveiling disparities across the country, some rural representatives expressed feeling underrepresented and resource-deprived, with urban centers often receiving disproportionate attention. In this landscape, the shadows of capitalism emerged as its divisive forces hinder the progress towards equity. Education's profound impact on young leaders was also discussed, and the field leaders highlighted the risks of avoiding difficult topics in schools. They emphasized the importance of practicing personal responsibility, cultivating empathy, and understanding history within educational settings.
In this complex terrain of community stewardship, participants passionately underscored fostering genuine connections, recognizing the flaws within humanity, and prioritizing harm reduction as essential facets of crafting a just and inclusive community.
Final Thoughts
One Field Leader said something in our final session that gave me an, “aha,” moment. She called for this work to be an invitation for young people and community members to join in on wrestling with the questions interdisciplinary leaders seek to solve every day. She offered that we all are just doing our best in the face of complex issues, and leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers, they’re the ones asking the questions.
When I first started developing what has now become Game On! Equitable Development Leadership Academy, I believed the path forward would be linear, ordered, and precise. I created a formula for the project and sought to fill in the missing variables. I thought we’d find answers for questions related to creating equity on the local level. However, halfway through our project, I’m sitting with more questions than answers, but I know now that these questions will drive us forward. I’m grateful for the field leaders’ thoughtfulness in the first part of this project, and they have renewed my stamina for this work with their honesty, wisdom, and collaboration. I’m eager to find more questions to ask, and I invite you to engage with the Mural Board that tracked our journey thus far.
To learn more about the Equitable Development Leadership Academy, click here.
The Equitable Development Leadership Academy is sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and facilitated by Sophia Rodriguez, Anthony Johnson, and members of the Solvable team.
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